


Georgie Grows Old

by draculard



Category: IT - Stephen King
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Canonical Child Murders, Elemental Ghosts, Gen, Ghosts, Grief from the ghost's POV, Grief/Mourning, Haunted Derry, Passage of time
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-23
Updated: 2020-07-23
Packaged: 2021-03-05 10:55:55
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,050
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25469638
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/draculard/pseuds/draculard
Summary: The kids tell each other there's a ghost haunting Derry's waterways.
Relationships: Bill Denbrough & Georgie Denbrough
Comments: 1
Kudos: 10





	Georgie Grows Old

The kids tell each other there’s a ghost haunting Derry’s waterways. In a way, they’re right. Georgie hears them arguing — different kids on different days — about how old the ghost is, what sex, what he’s wearing, what she looked like, how he died.

“She’s like my age,” says one boy about the age of thirteen. _Bill’s age,_ Georgie thinks, but that hasn’t been true for years. “And like her entire _jaw_ is missing. Like it got _ripped off_.”

He gestures to the lower half of his face, then stretches his mouth open until there’s a sagging black hole beneath his nose, filled with glimmering hints of wet, red tongue and nubs of off-white bone. Georgie can’t tell if this kid is lying or not; he thinks probably not, but he can’t know for sure. He’s never seen the other ghosts.

“The ghost isn’t even a _girl_ ,” says another kid. This one sits on a log nearby, her knees scabbed and bent. “It’s a boy—” Georgie’s ears perk up. “—and he’s not our age. He’s at _least_ sixteen. He lives in the river.”

Georgie looks down at his galoshes, buried deep in the mud of the river bank. Water eddies through his blue jeans. Through his legs.

 _Maybe lots of people live in the river,_ he thinks. Invisible people. They live in the river and in the ponds closer to Derry; the sewers; the standpipe. He was there when bodies gushed out of the drainage pipe in the Barrens, so he’s not surprised.

“I saw him when I was hiding from Parker Quint,” says the girl sitting on the log. “You know how it is.”

The boy nods. Silently, unseen by the other children, Georgie shakes his head.

He can’t remember what it’s like to hide.

* * *

There’s a new house where his parents used to live — Georgie knows because he can see it whenever it rains. He stands in puddles of water on the street, letting cars go through or around him as they please, and stares at the new house’s front door.

At the potted plants outside, just starting to flower.

At the children’s bikes leaning against the porch, just far enough under the awning that they wouldn’t rust out due to rain.

At the warm glow of light behind the windows.

Inside, Georgie knows, a new family cares for their children like his parents never cared for Bill after the flood. Probably, the parents were born years after Georgie died; they tower over him when they slam their car doors shut and race inside to get out of the rain. The father carries a girl in his arms, a girl taller than Georgie but several decades younger. 

She peers over her father’s shoulder at the boy in the street, his yellow rain slicker clinging to his clothes. She waves. Her brother, almost as old as Bill was back then, looks over his shoulder, too. He doesn’t see a thing.

Inside, there will be warm dinners and clean linen and no stench of raw sewage or split-open, rotting bodies. Georgie watches the door shut as rainwater drips down the line of his nose, soaks into his collar beneath his coat, makes the wool of his sweater stink.

Inside, it must be dry. Georgie rubs wet hands together and tries to remember what it feels like to be dry; he only ever seems to wake up in the river or in the rain.

* * *

He stands in a culvert alongside a country road, feet in the water and neck craned to watch the stars. He remembers every single constellation Bill ever taught him, but there are others out there he knows he’ll never learn. There’s no one to teach him. 

A comet streaks by overhead. Down the road, there’s a little farmhouse full of Derry kids having a birthday sleepover. The windows both downstairs and up are open; Georgie can hear them in the attic room, quizzing each other on which girls in their fifth-grade class they think are virgins and which are sluts, and he can hear the horror movie they think is turned down low enough that the parents can’t hear.

More importantly, he can hear the parents’ TV. In the living room downstairs, they’re watching the local news.

 _This comet,_ the weatherman is saying, _won’t be visible from Earth again for the next six thousand, four hundred years._

Georgie watches the sky, tracking the comet with his eyes. The kids upstairs are missing it; their parents are, too. But he’s watching it. He has nothing better to do. 

And he’ll be around to see it again, he supposes.

* * *

Georgie’s grown old, but Bill’s grown _up_. That’s all Georgie can think when he sees his brother again. Bill stands tall — tall _er_ , anyway — and has bags beneath his eyes and stubble on his face. He’s finally grown into his old silver bike; his feet reach the pedals, and he doesn’t even need to stretch.

But his brother’s only be the water in the Barrens for a moment — not long enough to notice Georgie, not long enough for Georgie to speak. He and his friends (the same friends? Georgie wonders) move away, to their hideout deeper in the woods. Where it’s dry. Where Georgie can’t reach. 

He stays in the water and watches them go. He feels Derry changing over the next few days; the air tightens around every citizen, like the particles themselves are trying to squeeze the life from everything that breathes. The water grows thick and slow, and Georgie swears he sees fragments of himself get torn and swept away in the current.

And for the first time, out of the corner of his eye, he sees flickers of other children. Flashes — just outlines, just silhouettes — of the ghosts he’s heard living people talk about for years.

When the flood comes, Georgie can be everywhere at once, and finally he understands:

The curse is broken.

The Leviathan is gone.

And tentatively, with a smile spreading over his cheeks so hard it hurts, Georgie comes to the last conclusion:

He’s free.

* * *

But the floodwaters finally recede; the damaged facades of downtown businesses are repaired; Bill leaves, and his friends follow him away for the last time.

And when the first rain comes one week later, Georgie is still there.


End file.
